A horror movie with real characters and real emotions

Rating: Null/10 (13 July 2003)

I enjoyed 28 Days Later because it features characters we can identify with. A guy called Jim wakes up in a London hospital and finds that the hospital is deserted. Then he walks out onto the streets of London and finds them deserted too. He looks at a newspaper and finds out why the streets are deserted. A monkey-borne plague has spread across England and many people in the country have fled while others have died...or have they? It turns out most of the "dead" people are now flesh-eating, rage-filled zombies. After Jim narrowly escapes from a group of them, he takes refuge with two London citizens who survived the crisis and are now determined to save England from this virus. They go to Jim's house, where Jim finds his parents dead in bed, a photo of him clutched in his mother's hand. Jim breaks down and starts sobbing (real emotion). Losing your parents is an awful experience, but it gets even worse when the parents come back to life as zombies and attempt to kill their son, so the freedom fighters pump them full of bullets, and Jim has to watch them die all over again.
The loss of a parent is experienced again in the movie, when a little girl called Hannah watches her father turn into a zombie after being hit with infected blood and a group of soldiers gun him down.
The ending is a bit of a trick. I expected Jim's mother to be knocking on his bedroom door, and Jim wakes up in his own house and realizes it was all a dream. That's as far as I'll go, because I don't want to give away anymore.
It's no classic, but interesting.